The Way We Live Now: taxonomically. All of our expenditures must be organized into "necessary" and "unnecessary" piles. The hard part comes when deciding how to sort everything. Sliced bagels: necessary or not? Your financial future depends on it.

Whole bagels? No tax. Sliced bagels? There's a tax. Which raises an interesting question which really distills our nation's economic woes down into a viscous, hashish oil-like substance: Do you want to enslave you fellow man?

Nor can you demand the right to untaxed sliced bagels. You're too lazy to slice your own damn bagel? Pay the government, big man. The only "necessary" thing here is the bagel itself, and the sharp knife, and maybe the deli paper they wrap around it. Don't like it? Get the fuck out of Starbucks. Think about it.